Twitter announced during its Flight developer conference in October plans to roll out an update to embedded timelines and following up on that said it is getting ready to do so. The micro-blogging firm plans to roll out a refreshed, modern design for the timeline display on March 3, says a report from VentureBeat.
Twitter gives more control to publishers and developers
Twitter’s new design will allow timelines to blend better into publishers’ sites but still to be fully responsive.
In a blog post last fall, the micro-blogging firm wrote, “Publishers need a powerful visual storytelling tool to truly engage your users, so we’ve built an embedded grid which displays your curated content in a rich, responsive, media-forward format.”
With this move, publishers and developers will get more and even better control over the way tweets around specific conversations can be featured. The new timeline will become functional next Thursday and will allow anyone to start embedding profiles, lists, collections and more. Automatic upgrades will be made to all existing timelines, but the current sizing and customization preferences will be maintained.
Owing to this change, Twitter has done away with the “hide media” option, thus allowing tweets with media to be expanded by default. Such a move has considerably reduced the number of clicks a user is required to get to content. There is the option of in-line sharing on every tweet in embedded timelines to facilitate easy re-tweeting.
Part of overall efforts to turn things around
In 2012, the company introduced interactive embedded timelines that allowed anyone to personalize real-time tweets, photos, videos, lists, collections, GIFs and polls onto third-party developer environments. At that time, the social media firm explained that when a user browses through websites that have embedded a Twitter timeline, they will be able to interact with it in the same way they do on twitter.com.
The redesign may not be a significant update, but it is a part of the effort Twitter is making to show it can use its technology and service to have an impact outside of its domain. Embedded tweets send more than 1 billion unique visitors to developer apps and sites each month, claimed the company. The micro-blogging firm believes it can increase this metric by improving the overall experience so that it becomes more native to the environment.
